Our Guide To Notting Hill Carnival

It’s Carnival on Sunday and Monday! Here’s some stuff any decent human being who’s spent a summer in London should already know.

PENNED OFF PARTIES AREN’T REAL CARNIVAL
If you’re into smoking weed and drinking in the street with all your friends, loads of different cultures and loads of different types of really loud, proper music, then don’t go to a guest list only energy drink party (however well some of their recent projects have been - RBMA etc etc etc). We all love a free drink, it’s nice to be on a guestlist (makes you feel special) and David Rodigan is playing this year. BUT out of all the days of the year you choose to be a mincer, the day 2,000,000 people descend on the richest borough of London to have a good time is definitely not the day.

THE FLOATS AREN’T ALL THAT
Sure, this is what carnival’s all about in a way, but this stuff is for kids and tourists really. If you want to watch a bunch of tweens dancing around in leotards just go work in the repair center of the nearest PC World to Matthew Kelly’s house. If you go to Carnival, go to the stages run by real life black people and dance about, it’s more fun than papermache figures. And don’t think you can just check them out for half an hour - you’ll spend the rest of your day walking like a bride and queuing at police barriers  trying to get the fuck out of there.

GAZ’S STAGE HAS HOT GIRLS
Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues is a club that happens on every Thursday at St Maritz in Soho and caters to badly behaved aristocrats, literate coke dealers, 17 year old public school girls and old guys who tell those girls lies and ply them with drugs in the hopes they’ll cop a feel (they never do). Every year they do a stage that plays old ska and calypso, and if you’re a fan of those things and hot rich girls coked off their tits and after a bit of rough, then this is the stage for you. Those girls are dying for it, they’ve spent all year in techno clubs fending off the advances of Italian dukes in chest revealing shirts and aviators and they’re hoping to at least make out with someone who doesn’t wear Osaka Tiger boxing boots and have softer hands than them. So get on it.

DON’T LEAVE CARNIVAL
For some reason, all the after-parties for carnival are miles away, and all feature the normal things you find in clubs: people who aren’t your friends, bouncers, expensive drinks and someone who isn’t you choosing the music. If you stick around in west London after the carnival’s shut up shop, you’ll find that it turns into a weird, anarchic wasteland of (very large) house parties. If you can find your way into one of these (go to Gaz’s at 6.45pm and follow the crowds) you’ll probably have a lot of fun. Failing that you should probably just got to Plan B in Brixton.

DON’T BE THAT CUNT ON A BALCONY
If you’ve got friends who live in west London, bully for you, that’s where you’re gonna spend the night. But if instead of mixing with the rest of us, you spend the day hanging out on the balcony of their place waving at the crowds below like you’re somehow apart from the general public and are responsible for the carnival in some way, you’re a cunt. You look like the friend of a famous person who’s pretending to get annoyed with the paparazzi but is secretly loving it. You look like you’re in Peaches Geldof’s entourage, get back inside.

DON’T BOTHER WITH JERK CHICKEN
Jerk Chicken is fucking delicious, jerk is some sort of spicy BBQ marinade that Jamaica invented to make all the gun crime, poverty and gay murdering less painful to deal with on a day to day basis. It’s really brilliant, but don’t buy it at carnival because it’s impossible to eat with plastic forks out of a plastic tray and they don’t cut the succulent breast meat into manageable chunks, they just hit a whole chicken twice with a cleaver and give you a quarter. This means you have to navigate all the ribs, bones and gristle with a single weak polystyrene utensil, which either breaks off in the meat or pierces the plastic tray, then you have to sit on a piss covered doorstep pretending you’re loving it.

DOWNLOAD BLAISE’S MIX
Blaise Bellville is the sociopathic, vicious, arch-capitalist entrepreneur who runs Platform, and people love to hate him because he went to boarding school and ruins people’s houses when he’s drunk. Everyone at Platform agrees he’s a cunt, but Jesus Christ does he know and love Jamaican music. Last year he made a mix for carnival that he hasn’t bothered to top this year because it was so good. Find it here and listen to it.

That’s all really. Have fun xxx

BY BOB & BLAISE (TEAMWORK)